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Thursday, December 10, 2015

What We Need

Today is Emily Dickinson's birthday. She found what she needed in a life lived mostly at home, baking and writing letters and poems. Legend has it that she dressed all in white, lowered gingerbread out the window in a basket for neighborhood children, and was obsessed with death. Well, death was all around. "There's been a Death, in the Opposite House, / As lately as Today--" (Yes, she used contractions! And slant rhyme, lots of capitalization, and dashes.) Women died in childbirth, frequently, and frequently at home; the sick and elderly died at home; and the Civil War was going on in her lifetime. Lots of death there. The poet Susan Yount used Emily Dickinson for the Death Card in her tarot.You can find more tarot cards by Susan here, at tumblr, and here, in a poetry feature at Escape Into Life, from April (the cruelest month), 2013.

It's also Human Rights Day, a day in celebration of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document spearheaded by Eleanor Roosevelt after the shocking human rights violations of World War II and adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948.

Hmm, "spearheaded." Now that's an aggressive word, coming, as it does, from the sharp tip of a spear. Sigh...

Meanwhile, a rabbit has found what he needed: peaceful, out-of-the-wind, above-ground shelter under a plastic lawn chair overturned in my own back yard after the last mow of the season. The rabbit has been out there under the chair for days in a row, enjoying the mild temperatures and random protection. It's a multi-brown rabbit and a white chair. Of course.

About Me

"You must change your life," said Rilke. So that's what I keep doing. I've been an encyclopedia editor, a poetry editor, an actor and director, a library clerk, and an assistant professor of English. Now I'm a freelancer, work part time in a library, blog "eight days a week," study the random, tend perennials, and listen to birdsong.